Solved Playing 16-bit Windows games on Windows 11

Hello!

We all know that any 64-bit Windows version, including Windows 11 cannot normally run old 16-bit games and applications from Windows 3.x or 95/98. Most of you might say who cares, but there are others that want to play some older games out of nostalgia and also some Windows 95 games have a 16-bit installer so they cannot be installed, but can be played. One solution for 16-bit games and programs is to install Windows 3.1 inside DOSBOX and run the games from there. The solution for Windows 95 games is to install Windows 95 or 98 in a virtual machine and play them there, probably with better compatibility than running them of the host. Recently I discovered another method to run 16-bit games in Windows 11 and I wanted to share. It is a third-party replacement for NTVM which is missing from 64-bit Windows versions, called WineVDM. Extract the files in a folder, install it and then you can just double-click any 16-bit game and play it! Much easier than installing Windows 3.1 in DOSBOX.


Here is Microsoft Tetris 2.0 (1990) running on Windows 11:

Been using DOSbox since 2016. I have an old 16 bit game (Solitaire's Journey) that I play at some point almost every day.

I had played Jazz Jackrabbit shareware version (first world only). Recently I found the full registered version. Don't judge, it is abandonware. I play every night. At last I can enjoy it with full graphics and SoundBlaster sound. No more beep-beep.

allan said:

Been using DOSbox since 2016.

Click to expand...

Yea, me too, but a bit earlier than that. I retired in 2011 and was using it years before that.

I don't actually play games using DOSBox, but I do run some old programs. I have a application called HamCalc that is mostly written in GWBasic. It has 1 or 2 hundred GWBasic programs, for Amateur Radio operators, all combined under a main application. It works great using DOSBox. I have taken many of those GWBasic programs and converted them to HTML/Javascript for use in a browser.

I also have a SubNote Laptop that runs Windows 3.1. On the laptop I have a full MS Office Suite and Turbo C. I have several programs, written in C, that run under DOS. I can compile them on the Windows 3.1 laptop, transfer the executable to my Windows 11 laptop, and then run them under DOSBox.

GW-BASIC was my first programming language. It came with MS-DOS 3.3 that was installed on my first PC, an 8088 (aka XT) clone, Hyundai Super 16V with color VGA monitor, 640KB RAM 256KB Paradise VGA, 40MB HDD and both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disk drives. I remember creating simple programs while learning the language. I could read music notation so I was transcoding some songs to the PLAY statement in order to hear them because I wasn't too good at piano to play them myself. I had transcoded Door's Break on through. I also liked to do some simple graphics, too bad GW-BASIC was limited to EGA graphics, so I used mode 9h (640x350 16 colors). Later I had QBASIC and I could use mode 13h (320x200 256 colors). I can run my old programs in DosBox.